L.O.G. 121 Defining The Problem

All right, Greg, good morning. Are you ready to get started for the day?

Always ready, sir.

All right, so today's episode, for everyone listening: First of all, thank you for all the great feedback on our previous episode. That's actually what we're going to jump into today, meaning we're going to take, based on our conversation last week that we had about contributing factors in different police use-of-force cases, we're going to stay on that topic for the next few episodes to go over a few things. So, Greg, if you don't mind, I'm going to just go ahead and jump right into some prepared remarks that I have so that we've kind of got some left and right lateral limits and things here, and then we'll jump into it from there.

Perfect. It's your show. Knock it out.

So, due to the significant amount of positive feedback received from that episode, we decided to build on our conversation and try to provide a deeper understanding of all the factors that come to play, and provide some practical solutions that can be implemented quickly. But before we can arrive at a potential solution, we have to start with the most difficult and often oversimplified process of clearly defining the problem. So today's episode is simply that: Defining a really hard problem.

For those of you who are first-time listeners or wondering, "Hey, what makes these guys qualified to talk about these issues?", I'd like to direct you to the link in the episode details. It takes you to our website where you can read all about our expertise in human behavior pattern recognition and analysis. Or, you can stop trying to judge whether or not we are qualified by reading a resume that we wrote about ourselves, and instead, you can try and listen to what we say, how we say it, what our intent is, and determine our qualifications from there. Let our words stand on their own and see if they hold up to the test of ridicule and rigor. So far, in my experience, they absolutely have. And in case you're wondering, no, we don't write books, but there are people out there that have written books about our work.

So let's define some really hard problems. And when I talk about these problems, we're going to be addressing different groups: groups like the police, city leadership, the community, and the media. And we're going to talk about those different perspectives within these groups. But before we get to those groups, I want to run down a short list of issues that help define the problem we seem to be facing in so many cities in the United States.

So, Greg, here it goes:

We have very serious organizational leadership problems within many major metropolitan areas where stakeholders seem to confuse, conflate, or misuse their power, authority, or responsibility. This issue directly contributes to the lack of a clearly defined mission statement for our law enforcement professionals. Since they often lack a clearly defined mission statement, we get into the issue of what's known as "mission creep," and we suddenly have police officers performing tasks that they were not hired or trained to do. Due to the overwhelming professionalism of most police officers, these things go unnoticed until something catastrophic happens that typically involves the loss of life.

This is when the next issue of emotional, over-reactionary policies come into play, where politicians capitalize on the loss of life to push their own agendas that will "reform policing for the good." This will then lead to police unions pushing back on administration, saying that, "Hey, if they only had more funding, they'd be able to handle these situations better." So the funding gets authorized, and what does it get spent on? Toys! New weapons and body armor that rival our Tier One military units. How many times do we choose toys over training? Since the money was spent on toys, your training now consists of a click-through, web-based, check-in-the-box education. But don't worry, because the remainder of the funds was used on some comfy new office chairs, so your backside will be cozy.

The public outrage continues because society lacks any type of historical understanding of these issues or any insight into the actual frequency of these events, because if they see it on the news, it must be happening all the time and everywhere. Since we are constantly bombarded with these images and messages, it leads to a lack of faith and trust in our institutions, which forces politicians to come up with even more emotionally charged, bad, band-aid policies that have significant second- and third-order effects that will impact generations to come. In fact, I believe that's what we're seeing today.

What we're witnessing is what happens when a society as a whole never takes its policing seriously. The roles, responsibilities, and authority that police officers have been given far outweighs the training they receive. I am of the belief that society gets the type of police force it deserves. So maybe instead of blaming others, we take a look in the mirror and share some collective responsibility. I'm trying my hardest to do my part. What are you doing to be part of the solution?

So on that, Greg, I want to throw to you some comments. Those are just opening remarks that I have generally about what we're getting into today.

Yes, so this is what I would say, Brian, having heard those at the same time our audience heard those: I would say they're so powerful and so well written that one's suspicious that McKayla (Brian's wife) didn't write them to keep him in order. But two, I would say, Brian, I would throw that on the website so when people go to see the episode, they can actually read, which is what you said. So they can go back and go, "Wow, that was a very good point," or take umbrage with it. However, I would suggest that.

And then the only other suggestion I would make is I'd like to start, if it was okay with you, even before, you know, given an explanation of the allegory, maybe we could talk about the buckets and how we put them into the buckets first, just to give everybody at home an idea of how to keep score today while we're talking. Would that be okay?

You know, we have the buckets of understanding. We talk about the cop—that's the perspective we're going to talk about today. And then we talk about the community, and that's what we're going to talk about in the near future. Then we talk about leadership. But leadership isn't just the cop leaders; it's the community leaders, it's the whole public information officer, down to the District Attorney, down to the most important person in most counties is the county coroner, followed only by the county sheriff. So I just want to make sure that if everybody takes a yellow pad and just puts those, you know, three big circles that are on there, and then there's connected fiber. Brian, you talked about the media, socioeconomic factors. Is the economy tanked or is it doing well? Do you get what I'm trying to say? Politicians that may influence decisions. And once you see that those interact with those three major circles of power, those spheres, then I think it gives us a better understanding of how we approach issues. Is that a fair assessment?

Yes, and within those groups, there are internal and external perspectives. There are differing opinions on things. And so, there are forces acting within those groups, externally and internally. And we often, one of the issues, since we're talking about policing, is we, another one, is we don't really police our own very well. That's true.

Meaning, the police aren't very good at policing their own. There are reasons behind that, because they have strong unions, strong laws, because they didn't always, and they got hung out to dry and they had to figure that out. Well, guess what? The community and the community leaders, they don't police their own. They don't look at it. They're not telling each other within their own group to go out there and say, "Hey, hey, you've got to rein it in a little bit. You're getting a little outside of what we're trying to do here, the mandate."

Right.

Right, exactly. The politicians don't do that. Look at the major political parties in our country. There's so much infighting because they're not policing their own. So they're losing power when you do that. You lose power when you do that. But I think it's a good point to bring up how all those different forces act on each other, Greg, and the different buckets. And like Greg said, if you've got that yellow pad, put one circle, put police in there. Pick another circle, put leadership in there, which would be the sheriff, chief, mayor, alderman, all that. Another circle, put that community in there, and that's all the different stakeholders within the community. And then the media would be another one, because the media acts in a whole number of different ways and it influences every single one of those other groups. So that would maybe be like the fourth circle, but rotating outside and coming in to all the other ones, I guess that would be, if that makes sense, Greg.

Right. For example, you're exactly right what you're talking about, Brian, is how to look at this, the way that magnetism works, or the solar system works, or, you know, a covalent bond. So if we see everything is a hexagon—each one of those, instead of a sphere, is a hexagon—they're multi-faceted, which means that they could connect in many different ways. But just as much as there are portals for them to connect and angles for them to connect, there are just as many that are not quite right. Do you get what I'm trying to say? And some that are completely wrong. Brian, point-to-point doesn't work without a bridge, right? So we have to understand that if we're going to create some sort of connection and transparency and openness and really address these problems, we'll have to address those problems in open and transparent communication as well. So I'll throw back to you, Greg, go ahead and kind of let's get like a historical perspective and what you talk about with how we receive this information or how these situations get to where they're at now.

Yes, okay. And one thing, folks, you've got to understand that Brian and I argue all the time, okay? But what we do is we argue about things and we come to an agreement on how to move forward from it, rather than just stalling or stagnating. And the number one thing that we argue about, I would say from my perspective, is what things were like back in the day. And I'm sure Brian hates hearing me use that term when I talk about it.

So let's talk briefly about the Allegory of the Cave. So Brian and I do this thing where we dance around a campfire. Brian has a spear and I put on the headdress, and we try to communicate the old-style way to the rest of the classroom. Well, while that happens, Plato came up with this great thing a long time ago. It's one of three great ideas, I think, that Plato really nailed. And what he says is that if you're sitting in that inner circle and you're watching those people around the fire, you get a "flash to bang" that's almost zero. You understand what they're trying to transmit with very little miscommunication. But imagine that there was a sheet around that inner circle and you're in one of those bedrooms in that cave and all you're seeing is the shadow of those people acting out. And some are forced perspective and some blend into others, so you're creating a vision of what you think is going on around the campfire. And then, Brian, there are other kids that are sitting a little bit further from the light that the older kids are talking to, and the little kids are having their conversation: "I think that was a dragon," and the other guy says, "No, it's only a falcon."

And so you can imagine how here's the central message, but over time, and with these incidents of dissonance and turbidity in our minds, we've created a reality that may have never existed, okay, except in our own mind. So if we understand that, then you'll understand this next statement: When I grew up, when I became a cop, our mission was to crush crime. We're going to boot doors, we're going to ram cars, and we're going to shoot it out with the bad guys. And if you were a bad guy and you looked in your rearview mirror when we were pulling up behind, and we turned on the red and blues, you'd go, "Oh, [expletive], it's the cops!" And you wouldn't say, "Oh, it's the Sandusky, Ohio, police." You'd say, "Oh, [expletive], it's this jurisdiction," and you knew that those guys were not going to take any [expletive] and they were going to come after you.

Now, if you were a working man, if you were a common citizen, if you were a person that lived in the hood, all you did is wave because you were happy. You didn't have any problem with the local coppers. Now, there were incidents when they showed up, had to take Mom or Dad away for a domestic or something, and you were a little bit sad, but it was nowhere near what we've seen at least in the United States, and sometimes globally. And the big reason is because the leadership gave us a mandate. They said, "Go crush crime. Here's your gun, here's your badge, here's your scout car. Go crush crime."

Okay, and Greg, that's exactly—I mean, you're—this is why I wanted, one, historical perspective is everything. One, if there's a problem out there, someone's already figured it out, written a book on it, that's sitting on a shelf gathering dust, but we don't ever do that. And this is why I wanted you to bring that stuff up, because you just proved everything I said in my opening remarks. "Go crush crime"? That's not a mission statement. I mean, this is not—that's the point. What I'm saying is, yes, exactly. Your leadership told you, "Go crush crime." That's not a mission statement. That's not what we're doing. So, and that I want you to remember too, and the other perspective is, you just getting hired, like, "Dude, this is what I was told to do. This is what I was trained to do. This is what I'm going to do." Yes, I'm not—I just want to make it clear, I didn't really upfront—this in no way is placing blame on anyone, not on anyone. It's articulating what the issues are, attempting to define the problem to come up with a solution. I don't care whose fault any of this is, I really don't. I'm not going to cry over spilled milk, like everyone is. It's how do we fix it going forward? How do we take the lessons learned? So, sorry to interrupt your historical.

No, no, no, that's the point. So look at this, okay? We deal with artifacts and evidence to support reasonable conclusions. We always ask our viewership and our, you know, the people listening to us to do their homework. So I'll prove every statement that I just made, okay? So I come out of the military and there was two—well, three, I guess—pronged way that I could have ended up: one, back on the streets smoking a rock and shooting people for money. That was always an option. Number two, was go to General Motors, because one of the big three was hiring and you were probably going to make $27 to $35 an hour, do you get what I'm trying to say, and have the strongest union outside the Detroit Lions football team. The third thing was becoming a cop. Now, because it was a knuckle-dragger, because it was a blunt skull, and I didn't have a college education, you know, pissed away that West Point primary candidacy, what I had to do is I had to be realistic. So it was one, General Motors, and I didn't know anybody at GM, and that's how you get in. The other one was be a cop. So I went and they looked at me, they said, "You know, 6'2", 260, you're hired." That was it, Brian. That was exactly what it was. And they said, "Your military service is just a plus."

So in Detroit, and in Detroit metropolitan area, they had a thing called "STRESS": Stop The Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets. The mandate was clear: "We want you in plain clothes, in unmarked cars, to go out and we want you to flood these neighborhoods where the crime is the worst. We want you to interrupt crime in progress." Now, a lot of times what happened with the STRESS unit is STRESS got involved in shootings and the bad guys got killed wholesale, okay? There was a lot of killing, and it's because the STRESS officers, who were highly trained, were coming up against bad guys who were highly trained. Brian, it was a dark, murky, ugly underbelly of police work—the part that nobody wants to talk about, and no one was talking about it back then.

Yes, and even now, you don't see anybody that wants to touch on that kind of topic, right?

So what does STRESS give us? Well, we go to a different jurisdiction. We have an Amadou Diallo that's standing on a porch, smoking, on a very hot night. Okay, happens to be after darkness hours. Look, it sounds like I'm writing an affidavit for an arrest warrant, right? In a high-crime area. Do you get what I'm trying to say? Lone male. Do you get what I'm trying to say? Standing in front of a complex where drugs have been sold before and burglaries have happened. Folks, people have got to live somewhere. And Amadou's apartment was wicked hot, so all he wanted to do was step outside for a minute.

So you've got four coppers in their riot gear. And when I say riot gear, back then on the street that meant that they were wearing their speed-wack jacket that didn't say "police" on it until you pulled the little Velcro thing. They had the raid vest on so they wouldn't get shot point-blank or stabbed. They had their badge on a little necklace, Brian. Do you know what I'm saying? That they could talk into their vests. Then they were wearing blue jeans and a hoodie, okay? Something like that, you know?

And so they're riding around, one of them probably had a street sweeper-style shotgun in case there was a shootout. One of them might have had a door ram or a pry bar. Do you get what I'm trying to say? And everybody else had all the windows down and they were going a mile an hour with the lights out, and they looked like the Terminator looking for bad guys, right? So they see Amadou on the porch, Brian, and Amadou does a "holy crap, I know who those guys are!" So he starts fumbling with his keys. The guys in the car look and go, "There's one now!" And when they look at him acting nervous and trying to flee, they assume, because the four guys or 40 guys that they did before that did the exact same behavior and all were carrying a gun and drugs, they bounce out of that car and start running up to the porch.

So Amadou's doing that, "Should I stay or should I go?" He starts to, you know, cringe, grabs his room key, and as he turns around, all of a sudden one of the cops says, "Gun!" And somebody fires. Well, the bricks and the block and everything else, they flash that back at him and now everybody's shooting, Brian, okay? Except for Amadou, who never had a gun. And so these cops, who are really good cops, see one of the cops go down because he falls off the porch because there's no room for him. And all of a sudden this scrum turns into this "Oh my god, we killed Amadou Diallo."

Every one of those cops could have passed the lie detector test because in their mind they were doing the right thing, following the mission that was given to them. They were following the mission statement and they were within their protocols and procedures.

Yes, okay.

But the reality is, Amadou didn't need to die, and they knew it afterwards. Do you get what I'm trying to say?

Oh, yes.

And back then, civil law made them pay, and criminal statutes changed. But the idea, Brian, is you've got to understand how powerful that was. So now let's go one step. We talked about STRESS. We talked about how that can turn into an Amadou Diallo. Now let's talk about Rampart Station. All of a sudden, you've got the commander's intent, you've got to go there, crush crime, you're crushing crime. And all of a sudden, you're running after people, and they leave the house and you find a fully automatic subgun with a sound suppressor on the end of it, and you find a trash can, Brian, that's got $400,000 in undeclared U.S. currency, all in 20s, 50s, and 100s. And you look around and you're alone, and all of a sudden there are some of the people that passed that psyche eval and got hired by that agency that go, "My kid's going to college." Do you get what I'm trying to say?

Right.

"I got a drop gun. I got this." And you're saying, "Oh my God, those [expletive] cops." Dude, that happens. The librarians, they're happy. Yes, 7-Eleven clerks. I know a guy, doctors that did that. Do you get what they're trying to say? Doctors writing false scripts that have, yes, degrees from Yale. Okay? So, but what I'm saying is power corrupts absolutely. So when you go out there and you take a well-meaning "Duty, Honor, Country, God, Country, Flag," right, and you put them in a situation where they've got the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, they've got a gun, they've got a badge, they've got more power than Congress, okay? And the Senate, and the, you know, do you understand that the President can't put somebody to death, but a copper on the street can, Brian?

Yes.

All of a sudden now you go, "Stop! This is the way we're doing things from today forward." You must understand that there are still some forces out there that are pulling in those directions, and there are coppers that are doing the right thing every day. Brian, we're only seeing that decimal, that small percentage of the coppers that are making mistakes or blatantly doing the wrong thing. And I just want that perspective out there so we understand why cops are going to love or hate what's happening in America today.

Right. And that this is, that those are perfect examples of how these things play out at a tactical level and then become, you know, have those operational certainties and strategic unknowns, right? Exactly. Meaning, a decision is made which was a wrong decision, but it wasn't the wrong decision at the time. That's hard to understand for people.

It's when I go through some sort of training program to get me to do a certain task, I'm given these different scenarios to use, and I pass that. Obviously, if you're out on the street doing that, you clearly passed your training. And if it falls within your policies and procedures, and then, of course, everyone's going to go down the rabbit hole in these situations. "Well, how in the, especially the Amadou Diallo one, how do you think a wallet was a gun, dude?" Yes, that's how human cognition works. So if you can't answer that question, shut the [expletive] up! You shouldn't be in the conversation. No, exactly. You don't understand how these things work.

And I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of how that stuff works. We talk about that stuff in class, we talked about it on other episodes, and you know, what cognition really looks like and how your bias is playing into this. And I'm not talking about any of these BS crap people are making up today. You literally—I'll keep it general—you see what you want to see, you hear what you want to hear, and you believe what you want to believe. I don't care who you are, that's how humans work. So if you don't have something to counteract that with some sort of training or process or mindset, or whatever you want to call it, or whatever it is, if you don't have something to counter that to balance that out, you're just walking through living your life in confirmation bias.

But you're exactly right. Here's the thing: when those situations occur, that goes back into what I talk about. We get politicians that come in and say, "We're going to do this, we're going to do that. We're now going to do these procedures. Hey, you know what, California? You're no longer police officers. You're no longer allowed to use a choke hold to subdue a criminal." Okay, well, guess what that leads to? "Why choke them when you can smoke them?" Meaning what that policy does is make it easier, right, for a law enforcement officer to shoot someone in a situation than it does to apply a lower level of force. This is what I mean when I say our policies and procedures are often implemented horribly, meaning no one takes the time to do a cognitive task analysis and say, "What are the second- and third-order effects if we implement this policy? What else is likely to occur?" No, we slap a band-aid on it and go, "Look at what I passed! Look at what I made them do!" Right? And then these are the situations that occur. I think that's where we're at today at scale.

And I know you brought in, no, no, you're right, your perspective on the ground, and I do want to hit those perspectives from each one a little bit. Because now if you're the community, if you're society, and you're seeing this stuff play out, "Well, what the hell? How the hell do you shoot someone with a wallet? That was an innocent guy that didn't deserve to die." You know, I mean, now the other 100 before that all were, you know, involved in things that they shouldn't be involved with. But the point is, from that perspective in the community, it gives a feeling that this is, I'm probably, you even just said it, "Look how much power they have." "Well, I'm powerless now. This is a huge issue because this is happening all the time, because I'm seeing it all the time, right? So we need to do something about it right now. And Greg, I want results right now. Greg, I don't care about the investigation. I want to see that body cam footage right now, and that should be on the news tonight, even though that shooting was this afternoon." You stopped being rational and reasonable. Stop! Damn it, give me an answer!

So here's the thing, Brian, go back to the last couple of police exposes where we did things really wrong as coppers: Rampart Station. We were stealing money, we were killing people. Look, even the good cops in those areas looked another way and had to get out of there sometimes, right? No good cop wants a bad cop. No good cop in any agency. But I'm telling you, Brian, go to Texas, go to Miami, do you get what I'm trying to say? There's a whole bunch of agencies, New Orleans, where we got black eyes because coppers had an inordinate amount of power and no leadership.

So how does that work real quick? Yes, you've got a strategic layer that says, "Crush crime." You have an operational layer that was a bunch of dancing bears that used to mix it up out on the street and had a high body count and didn't take [expletive] from anybody. They did slap you down with that "posse box," do you get what I'm trying to say, for saying the wrong thing. And who are they administrating? The new coppers that were coming out of FTO (Field Training Officer program), right? What do you think? That's a recipe for failure.

And you're saying, "Okay, so leadership is a key." Yes, but transparency is a key. But we didn't have transparency. There was no transparency: 70s, 80s, 90s. All of a sudden, you came into the 2000s, Brian, and "flash to bang" was so much quicker. Now we are getting immediate information. I could get live feed on the phone of an arrest that was happening right now. And so all of a sudden the community was fully grown overnight, and now the community started asking questions that it was hard for the police agencies to answer. It didn't mean that anybody was hiding anything; it meant that this is how things were run. And even the coppers didn't understand that, "Hey, wait a minute, are we doing something wrong?"

Because it goes back to the worst answer someone will ever give you. Ever hear this? "Well, that's how we've always done it." If that's your answer, it means you don't know why you're doing that. Now, that might not be your fault that you don't know why, but that's what that answer means: "I have no idea why we do it this way. This is how I was taught, so this is how I'm doing it." Okay, if you don't know the why behind it, and this goes into that—this is what goes into—we have a complete and total lack of strategy here. There's no strategy, there's no plan, there's no commander's intent. So it's just, I'm just now at this point, I just do what I was told to do.

And those issues that you brought up is where those, these cases lead to that erosion of trust and faith. Why? Because of all that power. So the reason is, I know we always say, "Hey, look, there are bad doctors out there, there are bad lawyers, there are bad schoolteachers, there are bad gym teachers." I remember the one, where was that, North Carolina, who was in the cartel, going to rip them, and he was like the high school teacher? Just the other one, two of them died in a trailer park. It's like out of a scene from Breaking Bad. And this time it was actually real. But the reason why it's so much more powerful when it's the police is because of everything you just said. It's the level of power that they have, right? You just said a police officer on the street has more power than the President of the United States, and individually, in the lives of their community.

Oh, absolutely. So, think about that for a second: Is all of these situations and everything that you even talked about, what we're at, it goes back to what the one point about what we're asking law enforcement to do is far, far outweighs their level of training. And it's not that they're, and what I mean by that is they're not being set up for success.

Okay, great point.

You can't expect someone to do something without training them how to do that. And everyone looks at that stuff as a cost versus an investment, which is what it really is. So again, politicians come up with, "Let's—there was a few years back in Chicago—well, let's hire a thousand more officers." Yes, how's that working out for you now, a few years later, five years later, you know what I'm saying?

But strategically, it seemed like it was going to be a good plan. We bolstered the operational layer, Brian, and that's going to correct the problem at the boots on the ground. But it's exactly the opposite. If you don't have buy-in on the boots on the ground, then you're—and that's where training comes in—you don't have the buy-in of the boots on the ground, you're never going to change the strategic imperative.

Well, but this is—this is, it starts, it starts in both, right? You can go bottom-up or top-down, right? And meaning, ideally, you do both. But your tactical, operational, strategic level goals, they have to be working in concert with each other. They have to support each other. And this is what I'm saying is we don't have a clearly defined mission statement. What is the commander's intent? And what that means is I can tell you to go do this: A, B, C, and D. And now you don't need me anymore because you've been trained to handle that standard, and you can go out there and you have to allow them to have judgment and make sure that's on the ground. Because you can't—this is what we're seeing is, "All right, we're just going to throw all these policies. And now you're going to go down this checklist. Hey, now when someone does this, you will take them to jail. Now when there's a, you know, domestic dispute, one of them is going to jail, right? This is going to happen. When someone calls in and says this is happening, you will arrest that person." Okay, well now they don't have any options, right? You can't sit there and talk to that person's family member or bring in the pastor or bring in someone from the community. They can't do that.

And now what you're doing is, what are people finally realizing? "Wow, we've just had this plan over the last couple decades of just, let's incarcerate as many people as we can." What has that done to us generations later? So, what we're dealing with now is the result of decades of failed policy and not bringing this up to par. Greg, in Germany, you've got to go to, you have like, four years of training to be a police officer.

Yes. So sorry, let's—no, let's set a precedent. Yes, so Kai, my grandson, was born on the Fourth of July. So everything at the beginning was our Fourth of July defense: born on the Fourth of July, duty, honor, country, all that other stuff. Then we slipped into me telling you the way it was on the street and how, without leadership, it could easily, easily turn into Lord of the Flies. Okay, so there are two movies, folks, go look it up, you'll figure out what I'm talking about.

We've now slipped into the Judge Dredd, where there has to be the right kind of police officer for every situation. We need a police officer that's trained in social work. We have the one that's trained in domestic violence. We have the one that's trained in sexual abuse and stuff. We don't have that, folks. Okay? You think you do, but we don't have that.

Now the reason I'm saying that, Brian, is you have to understand that when you take a look at any of the "flash to bang" immediacy of communications, what's the first thing we do? We remove and replace the chief of police. Well, there we go. There are 30,000 cops in some agencies, 18,000 police agencies, some only have one or three coppers, and you change the head guy and you go, "Well, that'll change everything." Yes, what do you, what do you know after 30 years? You only impacted the strategic layers.

So let me tell you a real thing, a good thing, because resumes can be deceiving, folks. And I didn't write my own, and some people do. But I'll tell you what the person that gets hired as your chief of police—I'm standing and there's a deputy chief on the elevator. I just had a brutal night of fighting, looting, shooting, stabbing, car-ramming, and all this other stuff. Everything legal, moral, and ethical and within the law. It was just rough streets, buddy. And I'm coming in from the sally port, Brian, and I come up to the first floor. Deputy chief gets on, and I've got a prisoner in front of me, and we're both looking like [expletive]. And we're going up to the jail. He's only going up to the detective bureau on the second floor. So he looks at me, looks at the prisoner. He steps aside because he doesn't want to get any of that [expletive] on him. And he kind of looks and my name tag is hanging and my tie's off to the side, and he goes, "Hey there, Wilson, good morning." And gets off of the second floor. The deputy chief of our agency had no idea of what we deal with on the street or who the hell I was, Brian. That's strategic, not informing that operational.

And again, the boots on the ground are the Lord of the Flies in some instances. We—if you can operate with autonomy, if you don't have somebody telling you, like Brian, if I'm going to execute an arrest warrant, a search warrant—let's take a look at the Drew Brown Jr. (Andrew Brown Jr.) that was just on the news recently. If you don't think that I'm going to have a member of the community, the District Attorney, my SWAT team leader, and the emergency room physician, all in that same room and going, "Hey, this is the guy that we want to arrest. Here are the charges we want to do, and we're going to execute this at 1400 hours tomorrow in so-and-so district. This is our plan and everything else." I want somebody to ask the question, "What if he shoots back? What if he runs? What if it's the wrong guy? What if we're at the wrong address, Brian?" Do you think that happens all the time? I'm telling you right now, because of the volume of calls and how thin people are spread, and the demands that the community puts on them, that we're not always putting our best foot forward. Almost always cops are doing exactly the right thing. And I'm not saying they did anything wrong in Drew Brown, but I'm saying if you've got a high-stakes thing, then you understand high returns might be low returns. It might be a cop shooting, and all those other things. And what's the community going to do? Look, you've got a deadly force incident, which is highly volatile anyway. The emotional aftermath immediately turns into a crisis, right?

Why? Well, that, I mean, that's, you know, you talk about how we're inextricably linked in those buckets, right? The community, the police, the leadership. I think people, one, people forget that sometimes and we want to do the "us versus them," which is normal. Oh, yes. I don't care what group you're in, you're suddenly against the, you don't even know why. You hate the other group, but you literally don't even know why. Well, yes, I mean, right. And the less informed you are about your own opinions, the more likely you are to hate the other person's opinions because you can't even articulate yours. Confirmation bias. Ugly. This is the heart of the matter and these are the problems. And the problems are within these groups, and that's why I even brought up the one of not policing our own, right? So, no one's saying, "Hey, wait, we've got to wait for this investigation to occur. Everyone has rights here." Like, I know that sucks, absolutely. But it doesn't suck, right? When you say everyone has rights, it means everyone. So in this situation where if it's a law enforcement-involved shooting, guess what? That officer has rights, just like that suspect did. An investigation will show whether or not someone's rights were violated.

But we're going back to this, "No, I want immediate repercussions right now that I can show and we can put on social media and we can tell everyone this." And the whole point of this process is to get away from that. That's called a lynching, right? That was an ugly part of our history and still continues to this day in a metaphorical sense, right? Of, "Oh, we think that's the person who did it, let's go get him." No, the whole point of the Constitution is to give everyone rights and give everyone a say and give everyone a fair chance, right? It's to protect everyone, whether you like that individual or not, or whether you think it was wrong. We all have these rights.

And so that goes into one, lack of historical perspective, from a general lack of legal understanding, lack of understanding of how the Constitution works, and lack of understanding of where you fit in in that society: what your role is, what you can and can't do, and what you should be able to do. And our expectations, right? We expect everyone else to do everything. We expect to hold people to this super high standard, but we're not willing to support them. We're not willing to give them the best that they can. And this is when it goes into that training aspect. And I know we bring it up, but I don't think everyone really understands what goes into that, because everyone goes, "Oh, that's going to cost this much." No, it's an investment. Because here's the thing: If you make—what I'm trying to do with all this is, everyone's got to get off the [expletive] get off the "X" here for a second. Take a step back and think about this big picture on what you want this to really look like and what this should be in our country, okay?

So we just talked about how much power, responsibility, and authority someone like a police officer has. You know who I want? I want their best. I want the best of them always. And I want them the best training and the best equipment and the best support and the best healthcare and the best this and best mental health issues, you know what I mean? Because why? They're policing us. This is a huge, huge responsibility. And this isn't a knock on anyone. I'm saying we haven't set them up for success. Because when you do this, when you say, "Greg, I'm going to give you the best training in the world. I'm going to give you the most competitive pay you've ever seen. Greg, you and your family, I'm going to give you the best healthcare in the world. I'm going to take care of you. This is what we're going to do. I'm going to make you part of this." When you do that, yes, is it a bigger investment? Does it cost more money? Does it take a lot more? Yes, it takes more time, it costs more money, all that. But here's the thing: Now I get to hold you to a higher standard, Greg.

Of course.

How do I get to hold you? No, no, no, wait a minute, wait a minute. I gave you the best. You step one, you just get off just a little bit, you're off-angle and you're gone. Because I gave you everything and you knew better. But if I don't do that, I can't, I can't, I can't expect that out of you. So, we're going back to Germany in just a second, just so you know, that four years of training. But I want you to understand how what you just said can go horribly wrong and a fracture occurs, and that fracture has to be filled. When there's a hole, a whole entropic principle is going to be filled with something. So you have officers that were hired in my era or just afterwards, and some that have been recently hired that begin to take on their own sense of mission. Why? It's largely shaped by their daily on-the-job experiences. "You don't know what I'm facing."

Now all of a sudden I get these poems that come out during the worst times, when something happens like that, "Hey, keep your thanks, I don't need it. But just understand when your choking baby is drawn into the emergency room and the shots are being fired and you call 9-1-1, it's me that shows." Hey, listen, pal, if you're not wrapped tight enough to understand that that's the job you took on, leave the profession, because somebody right behind you is ready to step up into that job and do a better job. And they will follow this commander's intent, they will follow the U.S. Constitution, and they will follow your mission. Now, next thing, Brian, go ahead.

No, no, and that's—that's another example of exactly the fifth—that was the fifth example of the four you gave. I would add that as well. That's, this is, this is just within those groups of lack of perspective, right? And that's what that means. And it's a small group, but that's also a very—but it happens to all of us. It happens. Who hasn't been so enraptured in what you're doing, you can't see the forest through the trees? And guess what? That officer that said those things—and I was channeling how that would sound, okay—that officer doesn't understand that Camden, New Jersey, voted their police department out and said, "We're not going to have one unless it's rebuilt in a new image." Folks, you don't understand, the community gets exactly the policing that they deserve, that they want, that they fight for. So, about his own sense of mission, okay, even though that's a small group of people, they don't understand that a community can come in and say, "Goodbye, we don't want a police department." Camden, New Jersey, is a perfect example. Camden said, "If this is the way the cops are going to act, we don't want to." And it wasn't the actions of the entire police department. It wasn't down to the fabric of the coppers. It was a few bad apples to spoil it for everybody else. But, Brian, they left, and the sheriff is going to take over. They're going to privatize. The problem with "flash to bang" immediate viewing of an incident is there's no time for calm heads to prevail. And now you've got the copper on the ground, his experiences, the way he talks to the public, the way he acts, largely shaped by the experiences that they have on the job.

Then you have the community that looks at it and says, "Okay, I just saw a young black male killed, or I saw a Sikh killed, or I saw all of the perpetrators are, or have shirts, or everybody's a Catholic"—whatever the hell your thing is going to be that you glom onto, that one thing that your little set comes out there and guess what happens? The next thing is, we're not looking at it as an individual and unique incident. We're not looking on its own light or its own merit. We're putting all of it in and we're saying, "us versus them." And guess what? Even if you're near the edge, Brian, flush that toilet, because it's all got to go.

And that's no, that's not what the Constitution was written for. That's not what civil law is written for.

And it's not just about the Constitution.

That's when you're talking about organizational change. Like, why? Why wouldn't you take what you've learned from in the past and say what didn't work and what did work and what should we keep? The idea of, you know, "We're just going to come in and I'm going to tell you how to do your job that you've been doing for the last 5, 10, 15, 20, 40 years, whatever it is." Yes, based on this. It's just one, like you said that it's, it's intellectually lazy. Like you're going to come in here and just say, "This is the problem, this is all we need to fix," and you're part of the problem. You're going to walk into an organization and tell them that they're the ones. It's almost, Greg, in all of your experiences, I'll speak to my experiences, working with whether it's military, law enforcement, private companies, Fortune 100 companies, schools, hospitals, churches, whatever it is, you know what? It almost never is the people working there are almost never the problem. In fact, they usually, most of them, go above and beyond what they're supposed to do.

Appreciate it.

This is what I'm saying. And what is it? There's usually some sort of either organizational issue, a communication problem, a structure, a way to do this, a poor management for these reasons, lack of overall strategic vision, right? This is where it is. It's the policies and procedures. It's almost never the people. Look at our friend, Dr. J.J. Walcott, who's an incredible research psychologist, worked in and out the DoD forever. And what did she do when she wrote her book? She went around to all these different government agencies because that was her job to go, "Hey, how do we increase efficiency? How do we get better? How do we do this?" And everyone at those places that she went to, they all had the answers. They all said, "Well, this is the problem with this." And then that person gets put in charge, and the only way they can move up in their career is to get a bigger budget. But we don't need a bigger budget, we need a more effective way. Like they already had the solutions to the problems. Go figure, the ones working at the organization know how to fix it. Okay, what do we get from people all the time? "Hey, look, I'm trying to come up with these ideas, I'm saying this, and I'm getting laughed at or no one's taking me seriously, or we're not looking at it that way."

So that goes back into that institutionalized way of thinking and lack of perspective, right? "I've been in this forever. I know it works. I know what's going on." That's that [expletive] leadership. And I don't—when I'm doing this, when I'm talking about bad leadership or people not making decisions, they weren't trained to, like they wouldn't even get leadership training. They didn't have some way of, "Hey, this is how you take new policies and adopt them into new protocols and procedures. This is how you adapt your organization to move faster," right? To take new incoming issues and develop solutions for them in real-time or ahead of time so that you can get—no one does that. Everyone goes, "Look, dude, this is what I was trained to do. Now I get promoted, I put my time in." Which, so I'm not saying it's their fault, but it is their responsibility, and no one set them up for success. Do you get what I mean?

I totally get what you mean. So let's go to my point, you know, that I've predicted that there's going to be a homicide on a U.S. commercial flight within the United States, and it's going to happen soon, right? If it is, I'm surprised because of COVID it hasn't happened already. But yes, we've been talking about this and saying, "That's the next big thing." Yes.

So now we take a look at Miami. Miami had an all-out brawl because the people that were standing there, waiting to get on a flight, there were no more standby seats. And they're dragging people, macing people, arresting people, and a poor situation. I'm not going to besmirch the airport or the people. But people are at a heightened level of anxiety when it comes to certain tasks because of complications and factors that Brian talked about.

So now we take law enforcement, and because bad things have happened, and they've been highlighted in the news, and you can't look without seeing or hearing something of them, just like they did the COVID, just like they did everything wrong. And I'm not saying COVID's not serious, and I'm not saying that the Floyd trial wasn't serious. What I'm trying to say is you've got to maintain your perspective, because if you don't maintain perspective, I'll make another prediction: Millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions, if not a billion dollars, is going to be spent over the next four years on training. And what it's going to do, it's going to go to all the wrong training. Because when they go into that room, there's going to be the same talking heads from the same companies that have been there for the last 100 years, and they're all going to have a plan. And Brian, they all have lawyers and make more money than we'll ever make in our entire life. So they're never going to read my resume. They're never going to, you know how I start off every class? Well, you do, but most people don't. I go in and I say, "I'm going to change your life in the way that you look at the rest of the world. And if I don't do that by the first break, I want you to grab me and throw me outside in the parking lot, and I'll pay your money back."

Brian, I've said every course for over 40 years, "We've done that the same gosh-damn way." But we'll never get in a room. You know why we won't get in a room? Because they all think alike. That's why all presidents—and when you go into the Hall of Presidents, all looked alike. Do you get what I'm trying to say? They're all white guys that were a certain age, that wore their hair the same way until we had some changes. And do we, as the United States, love change? We hate change! "Oh, Trump said he was going to drain the swamp!" And then the next guy comes and goes, "I'm going to fill the swamp!" And everybody comes back. Listen, we spend more money spinning our [expletive] wheels in neutral, and we never get anywhere. We never move the dial.

This is a chance for the law enforcement officer on the street to understand that they're instrumental in change. Okay? They're at the boots-on-the-ground level, which puts them at ground zero in the tactical fray. If they don't understand the mission, if they don't understand the commander's intent, and they don't understand the law, it's a dangerous ground that they're on every single day that they go out there, and their communities are expecting them to do more than they've ever done before with less and with more demanding circumstances.

Part one, operational layer: If you're a supervisor, if you're a sergeant, if you're a dispatcher, if you're a person that makes that stuff happen, you've got to understand that you're in a game of nanoseconds, a game of inches, and a mistake with you is going to have reverberating effects all over the place. And if you're a boss and you don't get that, you better start throwing out—stop worrying about your [expletive] uniforms and the decals on your car and all this other crap that I hear all the time, and start worrying about the quality of the training and the quantity.

I mean, I don't want to turn this into a bash on that. I mean, those things all occur at a lot of places. It's just, this is why we brought up all the different factors involved, you know, the community and the leadership and the media portraying this and stirring this up. So I think, you know, part of defining that problem is, which we won't get into this one, is, you know, "Hey, here's what some of the solutions are." But, you know, the defining that problem is we're not, like I said, we're not policing our own. We're not taking, we're not taking a step back because even when you brought up right there, you're talking about, "Well, all these decisions, you know, it's life or death, it's in these milliseconds, it's everything." Well, if we're constantly just thinking that way, then nothing's ever going to change because we're at "bang." Right?

And so the whole point is, what's—you do have time. We all have time, right? I know it seems like we don't have time now, because institutional change is necessary. That organizational transformation is inevitable. The good cops are doing it, Brian. The good cops understand that they left the incident thinking it right. But this—this goes into us in society as a whole, and all those different factors, is just everyone's trying to slap that band-aid on it or change this without thinking about what this is. And my whole point is, let's take a step back and figure out what do we want this to really look like and what this should be in our country? No one, no one's done that.

So in all of the the definition of the problem are all these organizational leadership issues, inside of all of those buckets that we talk about, right? So it's not just at the police levels, at the community level, and the leadership and the elected official level—which any of our listeners know I'm generally not a big fan of. Right? But that lack of perspective is a huge, huge problem. And I agree, I totally agree. And that's what I mean by all of this is taking that step back, and we have to, as a whole, as a society within that community, say, "What do we want this to look like? What do we want this to be? What are our ultimate goals here? What are we trying to do? What do we want a police force in the United States to deal with and handle, and where should their role be in there?" Because I'm saying it hasn't been clearly defined, and the only people who've ever been trying to clearly define it and push the bubble and make it better, are the police officers who have been screaming their whole career, saying, "Look, we need more training! Look, we need to do this!" Those are the only people asking for more. And that's where it's come from. I agree. The professionalization of the police has come from within the police. Those are the only people who've been screaming for it, and they're still screaming for it. They're still trying to do it. But, you know, no one else has picked up on the fact that this is—I think until now, we're at a moment where everyone's really looking because it's just top of mind every single day that, you know, we need to take a look at something like this. But what I fear is happening is, like you said, now there's going to be federal guidelines going to come down, and now it's going to be this, but there's nothing to be attached to that. There's just going to be mandates. There's not going to be real explanations of what this is. And no one's taking the time to sit here and say, "What do we want the police in our country to look like?" Meaning, "What do we, how does that work within a community? What are their really their roles and responsibilities? What are they doing right now? All right, let's compare those. Oh, here's where we're getting off track. We're using resources in these areas that they shouldn't be involved in." And in some cities, they're doing that, right? They're thinking, "All right, well, instead of this call with something with a homeless individual and emotionally disturbed folks, hey, we don't need all the police to show up. We need social workers and we need care for those people." We don't need it as—and so I know that's happening in some areas, but I don't think to the level or the scale that it needs to yet.

I agree. I agree. And all I'm saying, Brian, let me make sure that my point was clear: I'm saying that the same four idiots are in a room back in the East Coast somewhere with their degrees and sitting down and saying, "This will solve the problem." And they're the same people there 20 years ago. And my idea is that the government's going to buy into that because of all the jurisprudence and the different letters after their names. And those people have never been out of the strategic layer. They have never been down to the boots. They've never usually been out of the academic [expletive].

So, but to that end, I want to throw in Germany. First of all, the Germans have a track record for being a kind, wonderful people. They've never used excess and never colored outside the line. I don't know if that's historically accurate. Just ask Poland. They were invited by my mom saying, "God bless my mom, I am now an orphan." But that's not how that works. But the Germans, who I love, have four years compared to our 18 to 22 or 25-week police academy, with another five or 11 weeks of FTO, depending on where you go in the country. We have less time in the academy, and this is stuff that people have gained. It's not a law. It's each state and each community and each agency of the 18,000 police agencies have these standards review boards that they say, "This is how long it'll be." Brian, because of the nature of crime in America and how we police, those courses are largely how to drive, how to shoot, how to support an opponent, less than lethal, all that other stuff. In Germany, you're getting theory of domestic violence, do you get what I'm trying to say? A theory of environmental change and how it affects a psychological dependence on whatever socioeconomic issues within your community. Right?

So what I was trying to say is that if we continue to see the problem at "bang and flash to bang" with the news media only examines that portion, the crater that's left over, we are never going to identify the problem and move towards addressing it. And Germany doesn't have the same problems, and Germany has a budget. Look, everybody in Germany has to go into the military service for a couple of years. You want that, America? You reap the whirlwind when you go out and you go, "Well, why don't we do things like Saudi Arabia? We love Saudi Arabia." And just for that, Brian, we'll never, ever be back at our wonderful time that we spent in Jeddah. But the idea is that not all these foreign cultures are right for you. What works in London is not going to work in London, Ontario. And that's not cool, because the United States is much more complicated. And we are, we're a gun culture, so that—and we have been for a long time. The job is inherently more dangerous and inherently more complicated. We're not some homogenous culture that only has so many things to deal with, where everything and everyone is in common and can trace their lineage. But things are a little bit tougher here. And so that—and that's my point of comparison—is that when you make these comparisons to other countries, okay, well, let's do it. Yes, look at their level of training compared to ours, and look at our, look at our complicating factors, our level of problems compared to theirs, because it far outweighs it. So that shows that capabilities gap as being even greater than you get.

I totally agree. So go back to the Judge Dredd. We need a Judge Dredd squad, and I'm saying that metaphorically. People, shut up for a minute and just listen to the point. The idea is that we need crime-crushing coppers that go out after bad guys, because we still have bad guys. But we also need the kinder, gentler community policing people that work to get you a job so you're not even the "bigly." Yes, but no, that's not that's not—that's what I'm saying. That's not that. That's what the message is every day on all of the news media that's across there is that we have to completely restructure and also abandon and start over with law enforcement. And that's—that's why I put that in there as part of the problem. That's not their role. Why? Why should that be? They shouldn't be doing that stuff. Like even when you see the, "Oh, you know, someone does this and helps out this family." Like that's great, but you know that's not their job. So why are they—why did they have to do that of law enforcement? So it'd be kind of—but it becomes our end-all, be-all. "Well, hey, [expletive], these guys and girls can do it. Can you go handle this?" It's like, and what do you say naturally? Yes, I got it. You know, I mean, I can, I can do that. Because that's what you do when that's your duty, when that's your job, and you take it seriously. And someone throws more stuff on top of you, you jump up and say, "Yes, I can handle it." And you don't—I mean, that's, that's all, that's as simplistic as changing out the chief of police and thinking that the problems are going to go away.

I completely agree with you. We're going to start there.

Or just firing anyone. "Oh, let's just—let's just get rid of people. Or let's put this person in jail for a long time to show everybody else that, you know, that's going to work." It's like the speed limits and the lane markers on highways are merely suggestions, Brian. We're America. We like that freedom, and we don't want to sacrifice that. But, you know, today's episode is about identifying that problem, and I think that you've done a great job of framing many of the factors that have to be addressed before we can move on to people with skin in the game. And some people don't have skin in the game. And again, like I boil this, most of these issues, down to, you know, these different groups have to, have to, you know, get together and look in the mirror. I mean, you know, this is the thing, is you have to fix your own. "People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones," right? So that's what—that's what I was taught.

So what, what are the problems are solved in the clear light of day, sitting across the table from each other with a handshake and a pat on the back, and everybody says, "Okay, this is what we agree upon," and move forward. We're not there yet as a community.

Well, no. And that—that go, but, you know, these problems are solvable, but—and I think if everyone just focused, like I said, internally into their own group for a while and put that much effort into it, you'd come out with a lot of these different perspectives and you'd come out, or you'd come up with a better perspective and you might come up with some pretty simple solutions that'll work for you. And again, Greg, like everything that we've talked about, it goes, it's the relationship between all these groups and the relationship between all of the issues that I brought up that helped define the problem. They're all, they're all interconnected, right? They're all related. They're all bonded together in some way. So meaning, if you, wherever that insert point is, when you start getting into this, wherever you want to start, it's going to either upstream or downstream, wherever. It's going to affect the rest of these. So that's why we say, you know, top down, bottom up, right? "Here's what you can do at the different levels." And we'll get into that on a later episode. Sure will. But meaning, when you're just trying to define it, like you have to realize how connected they are. You can't just say, "All right, well, the issue with the police are these five things, and the issue with the community are these five things, and the issue with the leadership are these five." It's all the same. It's all the same things. When each one of those groups, and everyone's going to try to capitalize on these different events for their own advantage, right? And the media has got to sell tickets, man. So what's the next thing? What's the next hot button thing that can spray all over the news for people?

Oh, you're exactly right.

And the community, you keep consuming that crap, you keep clicking on it, you keep hitting that like button, you keep hitting that share button. Well, guess what? You're going to get more of it. I mean, regardless of how big an issue is, you're going to get what you want. It's your world, you get to, get to make it up. But I want everyone to understand how connected all of these things are.

Yes.

So whether you have a good attitude about something or a bad attitude about something, or your interaction with your neighbor, guess what? This is all, these are, these are personal responsibility issues. You know what? What do you want that to be? What do you want that to look like? And how do you want to be treated, right? Because are you treating people that way? And that's where, you know, we get into these conversations, can be tough because they can be emotional. There's a high emotional economy. Look at, you're getting emotional over this, talking about what's going on your career. You're clearly upset over it. And I, I, I get it. And that's the point that we have to say, "Well, we try and separate the emotion from the event when we're defining these problems and go into, 'Look, I, why I don't ever place blame on someone, I might say, 'Hey, this is your responsibility.' And then some, what happens, 'Well, I didn't know. I don't know.' Like, 'Dude, I'm not saying you did. All right, so relax.' I'm just saying, going forward, we have to fix this. I don't care who spilled the [expletive] milk. Let's just clean it up and make sure it doesn't happen again." Right? That's where I'm at. I'm not—but there—and there's a lot of people out there who are seeking to blame others, which in some cases, maybe they deserve blame. They deserve, you know, whatever comes from that, right? There is some sort of, I mean, there are consequences for your actions, so if you did something wrong, you need to be held accountable. And accountability is an extremely important part of all this. But you have to hold yourself accountable too. And that's—that's my biggest problem with all these, when people the rhetoric starts and the [expletive] breakdowns of all these situations come in, and everyone wants to talk about some new whiz-bang object that we can buy or thing, or some new whiz-bang policy and then go from there.

So, listen, you said something. I want to make sure that we're very clear when we try to say, "Separate the emotion." Listen, I'm not defending bad police work. I'm not defending all cops. I'm saying that I spent 30 years in the profession. I absolutely loved it, and I saved more lives than I took. We changed a lot of things positively, just like you did before you retired from whatever career that you've got, okay? So we can look back at that lovingly. We don't expect a person to lose a child under any circumstances and be happy about it. We don't expect a kid to die in a shootout with the cops or with another kid, and somebody to be happy about it. But when it comes time to reconcile, when it comes time to fix things, when it comes down to sit down at the table, Brian, then I completely agree, it has to be austere and emotionless. And it has to be yellow pads across the table, and very clinical, and very laser-focused and directed. And Brian, I fear that's part of the problem, is we're not approaching it that way. We're never going to solve a problem yelling into a microphone with a poster at a person with a face shield. Maybe that's necessary, okay? Maybe that's instrumental to change, Brian, but that's certainly not a starting point for fixing a problem. That's all I'm going to say.

And that's a tactic. So if you're, again, like you're talking about, you know, a tactic. If you're not tying that to some overall objective or theme or thing, then it's—you're just screaming into the air and you're wasting everyone's time and resources. So you're spending a lot of money that could be used to fix something. That I completely agree with. Yes, you're basically—you're causing issues. And if you're not tying it to an overall objective, then I don't know why you're doing it. You're wasting your own time.

Yes.

And you're wasting everyone else's time, you know. Yes. There's, you know, there's a lot that goes into these, Greg, and I—and the point of all of these conversations isn't to overcomplicate it. It's just to show how complicated this is. And so maybe it can cause everyone to take that breath, take a step back, go, "Damn, we've got to take in all these considerations." And for some people who didn't know any of that and said, "Wow, that's a bit much!" Hey, bow out, that's fine. You're not—no one's asking you to. If you're—I mean, this is like, remember, like we work with this stuff because it's—it's part of our client base of people that we work with and where we talk to every day and think that we can have the most impact with some of the stuff that we do and that we teach. So it's near and dear to us, but if it's not to you, then you don't need to have an opinion on it. Like, I always tell people too, like, "You don't have to have an opinion. It's impossible to have an opinion on every [expletive] issue that people are discussing in the world today. Like, you can't. It is not possible to have at least a logical, coherent one that's informed." There's no way. You'd just be reading all day, all night, and just to try and formulate a good opinion. But, you know, so we don't have to voice an opinion on some of this stuff. The reason we do it is obviously because it's near and dear to your heart and my heart and what we think can affect change rapidly, right?

So the next step in this process is obviously, "Well, what are some of the solutions to these problems?" And I'm not, you know, for the purpose of the discussion, some of the stuff we defined, yes, we oversimplified it a bit, but they're all just human factors related to this stuff. This is about people. This isn't about buying something new or getting a new person involved or doing this. It's just about people. It's developing the people that you have, clearly articulating what your wants and needs are and where that fits in with an overall budget and a plan, right? And moving forward. And there is no perfect solution. And some of the problems, I'm not even talking about. There are other people listening, they're going, "Oh, well, you're not even addressing this, this, or everything." And that's great. I'm sure, I'm sure maybe those play a factor, or whatever they are. And that's the point, is this is where we're getting into areas that we know all of these problems that we laid out today can be addressed, have been addressed. We know how to address them, right? And you can do that in a manner where you're—it's going—the net result of that is going to be a significant change.

Now, is it going to take a year, two years, five years, ten years? Yes. That's, that's what you want. So you shouldn't be thinking, "Hey, what do I want changed by this summer?" That's really stupid. It's, "What do I want—what do I want this to look like in two years, in five years, in ten years, 20 years from now? What do I want my kid to be dealing with? What issues do I want them to not be dealing with? What can we solve? What can we start the process of solving today that will lead to a resolution ten years down the line?" Because if you're not thinking that long term, then I don't know what to tell you, but your short solutions are not going to work for long-term problems.

Yes. And Brian, I would say that don't think that absolutely everything is an apocalyptic mess. Everything is dystopian. Yes, things are better now than they have been for a long time. And yes, we're not going to stick our finger in anybody's eye. That's not why we're here. We're saying that there are problems that are out there, and by framing that problem, by clearly understanding that problem, you can come up with the architecture for a solution. And it isn't one size fits all, and it can't happen at "bang." So, I just want to make sure that we frame it that way, and I think our listeners and our viewers will understand us when it comes to that.

Yes, I, I agree. The Orwellian-themed quotes that people have, and, oh my God, I think most of them, I don't think most, I don't think they actually read Orwell. I think they kind of misunderstood a lot in 1984, by the way. And I want you to understand that you reap the whirlwind. Again, folks, listen, there's a family that was killed by the patriarch in Texas because he didn't think there was a way out, so he killed his kids and he killed his wife, then he blew his brains out. And that's not an anomaly. That happens a lot. And there is a person that is in their garage with their car running right now because they don't see a way out of this, and suicide rates are astronomical. Why? Because if you say that none of this is going to change and it's going to be horrible and it's just going to get worse, look, you don't inherit that. You don't need to. You can change. You can be a change for good. You can be instrumental in the change. And so we've just talked about one thing today in the entire ice cube tray, Brian. We may have touched on three or four of the squares, and those squares have been spilling over. Yes, new water is pouring in, but we're going to endeavor to continue to try to fix, and through our small way, which is training on one hand, and then talking about it and being transparent about talking about it on the other hand, on a podcast.

Yes, and then, you know, these are just discussions that, hopefully, if you're listening and have taken some value out of, or if you have, or taken umbrage with, humanbehaviorpodcast@gmail.com. Please reach out if you think we're patently wrong. So far, everyone's said the exact opposite. Yes, yes, yes. But listen, if we understand there's a better way and we understand there's a mistake, we're scientifically reminded, and yes, we'll change it immediately. Done. So that's it. That's the point is how do you—if there's a better answer out there, believe me, I would gladly, gladly accept it. And, you know, so this is kind of part one, I guess, of this, this overall conversation, Greg, of defining the problem. And then, and then hopefully the next discussion we can have is, you know, what are the solutions? And again, that's going to be somewhat topical in general because there, there's, there's a little bit of, you know, what works in, you know, what works in one city or town might not work in another city or town. But the right framework will, and the right overall theme will, and the right mission statement will. Meaning, you, you can—it might play out differently in a town with 5,000 people than it does in a town with 5 million people in it. But I think a lot of these problems can be solved with the same set of solutions and how to address them. So I think we'll get to that on the next one. But I want to kind of throw to you to see if you have any kind of closing remarks on everything we discussed today, Greg.

Good idea. Stick around. Plato was onto something. We have to acknowledge that sometimes we're part of the problem, and we have to get new glasses to see sometimes that the emperor is naked and stopped running around and saying how good he looks.

Okay, well, I think that's a—a naked emperor is always a good way—good way to add. And just a "Kandahar Baby," which is funny, by the way, because a guy just released a book called, like, Boston to Baghdad or something. Great original idea, man.

There we go. Yes, yes.

I love you anyway. I think it's, it's out there, so what are you going to do? What are you doing? Yes. All right. Well, again, everyone listening, appreciate you tuning in. Follow us on social media for more. We've got the Patreon site as well. We've got all of our, a bunch of whole past webinars and stuff on there, different discussions. Sometimes we have episode extras that go into there that only folks are—it's only $3 a month. It's, as I've been told, the price far outweighs the value of what you're getting on there. But that's the point: is just to kind of show support for us and follow us along on there. So again, anyone have any questions, humanbehaviorpodcast@gmail.com. Go ahead, Greg.

And Brian, one, North Macedonia, we miss you. Yes. Second thing is, hey, how about them coffee mugs?

Oh, yes, yes. There's a link in the episode details. You can definitely still order a The Human Behavior Podcast coffee mug from the website, and the link is down in the episode details too. That also helps support us in a small way. Now that I've figured out how to actually set that up, so I would have to buy your coffee cup for you before if you were ordering them. That pesky math problem. Math is not my strong point. Nor is API, nor are APIs and integration to a website. But, but it works now and we don't get charged, you know, a dollar fifty every time someone orders one. So, so we got that. We cracked that code. Only took me—well, it took me one wrong order, actually, so thankfully I got on that. But thanks everyone for tuning in, and we do appreciate you listening and following along. And for everyone who reached out, we appreciate your comments as well. So don't forget, everyone, that training changes behavior.